Labyrinth Read online

  “How—?” I started.

  “Later. I left a couple of the new stunners in your glove compartment. Just in case.”

  “All right. We’ll make a simultaneous push. But I have to make another call. When you hear my neighbor shouting, rush the door. Oh—put the ferret away first.”

  He chuckled. “Got her.”

  “Fine.” I hung up and called Rick, my next-door neighbor.

  “Hey, Rick. It’s Harper.” I could hear Grendel, his pit bull, barking.

  “Hey, yeah, what the hell—”

  “Rough customers. Do me a favor: Call the cops.” I figured I’d rather have to explain away the mess to Solis—if he showed up—than battle half a dozen vampires.

  “I already did. Should be here any minute.”

  “Great. Would you take Grendel, go stand in your doorway, and tell those jerks in the hall that? You may have to shout ....”

  “Damn right I will.” He muttered a few imprecations against our visitors’ parentage and physiology before he hung up.

  I scrambled back into the Land Rover and grabbed both the stun sticks from the glove box. I left my purse in the car and took only the keys, shoving them into my pants pocket so I had both hands free for the stunners. I started running toward the condo’s shrubbery and was launching myself at the first figure in the bushes when I heard Grendel go crazy inside the building.

  The psychic stink of the vampire made me gag as it turned to grapple with me. I couldn’t see the eyes to know if this was an asete or just the usual bloodsucking fiend as I felt sharp fingernails cut into my upper arms, but I had plenty of movement left to punch the prongs of the device against its body and hold down the discharge button. The vampire convulsed and tossed me aside as it collapsed onto the ground, twitching into unconsciousness. OK, one plain vampire . . . though it had more the white-snake appearance of the asetem. . . .

  The second one pounced and I wrenched around in his grip, barely fast enough to discharge the second stun stick into him. He jerked back, and then I was facing a fireball that scorched my face as he immolated. Ash ringed the place where he’d fallen, but of a body, there was no other trace. Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen. . . . Upped the voltage, did he? So . . . what, one vampire returned to grave dust? Which made the previous one an asete that would be getting up again any second.

  I heard a distant gunshot and a scream, the blip of a siren as a patrol car rounded the corner. The asete near the door took two long steps toward me, hesitated, then whipped around and joined a second fire-eyed creature as it bounded out of the building into the night. They escaped as the patrolmen came running from their car with guns drawn, rushing for the door. I heard one chattering into his shoulder-mounted radio that shots had been fired and they were investigating.

  The second one paused beside me. “You OK?”

  “Yeah. I live here. Was going in when those guys came out. First one knocked me down.”

  “Stay put.”

  I nodded and let them get well ahead of me before I followed them inside.

  Someone was making a strange keening sound upstairs. It was an ugly noise that put a blade of ice down my spine. It was hard not to run up the steps, looking for Quinton and whatever was making that horrible sound. But I stumbled upward, keeping back so I wouldn’t bang into the policemen. The post-fight burnout was making me clumsy and muzzy-headed.

  I got to the landing as the cops got to my door—which was standing open, a drift of dirty white ash spread across the carpet in front of it. Quinton was kneeling down in the hallway, holding on to Rick who sat propped against the cream-colored wall beneath a red smear. Grendel was howling in despair. The rest of my neighbors were easing back into their own homes, pulling the doors not quite shut as they spotted the patrolmen.

  “. . . ambulance, damn it,” Quinton shouted back at the policemen.

  The one cop reholstered his gun and got down beside Rick and Quinton, calling for a medic on his radio. The other took a fast survey of the hallway and open doors, making sure the place was safe before he also holstered his piece. That was the one who spotted me and came back to run me off.

  I refused to leave. “That’s my neighbor. And the other one’s my boyfriend. I live in the unit with the open door.”

  “Looks like someone—maybe your boyfriend—has gone and shot your neighbor.”

  “Ask him.” I wanted to cry from tiredness and anger, but I didn’t give in, even though it might have bought some sympathy from the cop.

  The cop left me with a warning to stay where I was this time and went over to his partner. They conferred and then the suspicious one spoke to Quinton. I saw him shake his head.

  Another siren wailed and curdled to silence outside. The Medic One crew rattled up the stairs a few moments later with trauma bags and shoved everyone else aside to get to Rick. Grendel snapped and growled, not wanting to let them near his master. Rick muttered something and Quinton called the dog to him. Quinton and the dog made their way to me and we slumped down against the wall beside my gaping door.

  I tried to form a question, but all that made it out was “What—?”

  Quinton shook his head. “Those guys shot him when Grendel tried to jump them. I think they meant to kill the dog, but they were lousy shots. One got Rick in the arm, one in the leg. He’ll be all right, I think.”

  So we weren’t going to talk about vampires with guns while the police were there. I nodded. I didn’t have enough energy left to try to make sense of any of it. We sat and looked stunned, gave our names to the cops—or rather Quinton gave our names of record when asked—and staggered into my condo once Rick was removed to the hospital and the rest of the scene was settled for the night.

  The night had gone badly from the moment I’d touched down. Filling each other in on what had happened since I left for England and over the past four hours was vital. We needed to figure out was going on and what we collectively and separately knew, but I wasn’t coherent enough right then. Quinton and I put all meaningful discussion on the back burner for the night although neither of us was happy with that. We still had a lot to do.

  Quinton dealt with the dog while I moved the ferret’s cage into the bedroom. Not that Grendel is destructive; he’s just dangerously curious. And we both threw a few necessities into bags and packed up anything we might need if we had to bug out. Quinton—living as he did—was better prepared than I was, but I at least needed very little that wasn’t already in the bags I always kept in the back of my truck.

  By the time we were done, I barely had the energy to shower. Lucky for me, Quinton was willing to help with the soaping up and so on. He was sweet to me—sweeter than I deserved, perhaps, but I was grateful he was there, as always. As much as I tried to go it alone, I knew I was better with Quinton than without him. We were good together, and not just at the horizontal bop. It was nice to have someone to give up to once in a while, to show your weaknesses and not fear injury. It frightened me a little: Weakness and dependence are dangerous. I worried that he might be hurt by my need, by my relying on him, hurt the way Christelle had been. She’d worked for my dead father and for her loyalty and proximity had come to some still unknown, but probably horrible, end. Thinking of it, I fought an impulse to cry, feeling it in my throat like a lump of clay that even the soothing touch of hot water and soap had difficulty washing away.

  We got into bed about one a.m. while Grendel snored outside the bedroom door. Quinton would have liked to do something a bit more athletic than just sleep, but my energy was shot, and we curled together like exhausted puppies. I sank into a dreamless torpor as he pulled me tight against his body. The snowfall-flutter of moths under the streetlamp outside was the last thing I saw as my eyelids closed and the world fell away at last.

  Too few hours further into the morning, Detective Rey Solis rang through from the front door until I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I cursed the dogged policeman and his sunrise-loving ways. At this rate, I thought, I might ge
t some decent sleep sometime after Satan opened an ice skating rink.

  I’m sure I looked like something that had been extracted from under a thorny bush when I answered my door in dirty jeans, a Noir City Film Festival T-shirt, and bare feet. Grendel the pit bull completed the ensemble, gluing himself to my leg and staring at the detective as if measuring him for a side order of fries.

  I glanced at Solis from between puffy eyelids. The man isn’t very tall or very wide, and he looks like he’s made of gouged and pitted leather, but he projects a quiet solidity that gets a lot of suspects talking just to fill the silence and get out from under those unblinking black eyes. I’d have liked to wait him out on principle, but I didn’t have the patience. “Don’t say Rick died.”

  “No. Your neighbor is doing well this morning. He requests that you look after his dog.”

  I pointed at Grendel. “Got it. And Rick’s all right?”

  “Yes. He should be released tomorrow.”

  “So what . . . you got demoted?”

  “Eh? No.”

  “Then, what brings a detective from Homicide to my door if the guy who got shot is fine?”

  Solis made a small shrug, his round, impassive face remaining blank while his close-clinging corona of energy flickered yellow and gold. “Courtesy call.”

  “Bull.”

  “May I come in?”

  The living room gave ample evidence that something was up, piled as it was with bug-out bags and Quinton’s electronic and computer gear. I didn’t want Solis to start speculating but I didn’t want to have a conversation about what had gone down the night before while standing in the hallway. I didn’t want him to catch sight of Quinton either, whom he had known as Reggie Lassiter ever since our run-in with a monster on Foster Island. Complex as the situation already was, I wanted to avoid any additional conversational land mines, like . . . “Why are you still hanging out with that guy from the marsh?” or “Seen any monsters lately?” No matter what I did, this was not going to go well. . . .

  I made up my mind and stepped back to let him walk past me. “Sorry about the mess. I just got back from a business trip last night and I haven’t put anything away except for shoving stuff the dog might eat into the closet.”

  Solis grunted. “Ah. Where had you gone?”

  “London.”

  The detective looked at the pile of electronic equipment on my dining table. Then he shifted his gaze over the rest of the room. “How long were you there?”

  “About five days. A week with the flight time. Why the cross-examination?”

  “Only curious.”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  He shook his head and shrugged. “You are, again, in the center of a most curious circumstance.”

  “My neighbor got shot by some thugs. That’s nothing to do with me.”

  “They were knocking on your door.”

  My turn to shrug. “I wasn’t here. I came in with the first responders.”

  “Your . . . roommate—”

  “House sitter,” I corrected.

  Solis shrugged. “Your house sitter was here. Could this have been connected to him?”

  “No.”

  “You’re very confident.” I didn’t think he meant that as a compliment. “And where is Mr. Lassiter?”

  “At work.”

  “Mr. Lassiter is unemployed.”

  So Solis was still suspicous about the whole incident and everyone connected to it. He could worry that bone all he wanted; it wouldn’t get him anywhere on this case and the other was no longer his to pry into. There might be hell to pay for it another day, but not today.

  I just smiled back at him and went into the kitchen to start some coffee. “You are a nosy bastard, Solis.”

  “I am concerned.”

  “Why? Probably just some wannabe gangbangers raising Cain. It’s the sort of thing that used to happen all the time around here. And how is a nonfatal shooting in Southwest district the concern of Homicide?” The coffee machine made burbling noises as I turned back around to look at Solis. I leaned on the counter and waited for his reply.

  “There is a pattern of crimes recently that have drawn our attention. This incident, though not fatal, fits into that pattern. And there is you.”

  “Me? How? I know you seem to think everything weird in Seattle—”

  He cut me off. “No. I do not think it. It is a fact. When cases go strange, you are in the thick of it.”

  I poured myself a cup of coffee. “That’s a bit much.”

  “Do you think so?” He started ticking things off on his fingers. “In the matter of Mark Lupoldi, at the end I find you and his killer—a young man gone completely mad—in a place neither of you should have been. In the matter of the homeless deaths last year, wherever I turn, there you are, and again, it is you who brings the killer to us—just as the case is classified by the government.” The energy around his head and body began to jump and form spikes of frustrated orange and burning yellow as he continued. “There is the matter of the museum that burned down; and the man who assaulted you two years ago; and the business with the sunken ship, and of the poisoned child, and the lost brooch. . . . Oh yes, there is also the disappearance of Edward Kammerling, whom you had gone to see just before this incident last night. Shall I continue?”

  “That’s quite a catalog.” I thought about what he’d said and a few of the items took me by surprise: I didn’t know he’d made any connection between me and the museum fire, and what had happened to the guy who’d killed me? He seemed to think I knew, but I’d never followed up on that—I’d been a little busy. But funny that it should come up again since Alice had mentioned him to me in London. I would have to find out. . . .

  “Hardly complete.”

  I made a face and offered him a cup of coffee. This might take longer than I’d thought; might as well keep him happy—or at least confined to the kitchen.

  Solis accepted the mug I held out. He stared at me over the rim as he sipped, waiting for my reaction to his recitation.

  I heaved a long breath. “Look, Solis, you know my cases get strange sometimes. It’s not as if you haven’t benefited from that. I turn over cases that go hot—like the poisoning case. I play fair with you and the department.” Well, as much as I could. “If you think I’ve done something criminal, find evidence and arrest me. I don’t know what you’re talking about on some of those points of yours. The rest is nothing but coincidence and bad luck. Kammerling hired me for the London job. I just got back and was trying to check in. I didn’t even know he was missing. And what was that about the guy who assaulted me? I haven’t had any contact with him.”

  “You didn’t know Todd Simondson came out on parole last week?”

  “Why would I? The parole board doesn’t have to call me in—it was a plea bargain. Time served, we’re done.”

  “So you did not know he died two days ago, either?”

  That startled me and I spilled a bit of coffee on the counter as I twitched in surprise. “What? No. Of what?” I didn’t like the sound of that. . . .

  “Most mysterious circumstances ...”

  “That’s not a cause.”

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t say you suspect me....”

  “It fits.”

  “Not unless you believe in bilocation. Two days ago, I was on a nonstop flight from London to New York, and then on the connection from JFK to Sea-Tac. I spent fourteen hours in transit and I have boarding passes that prove it.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes!” I stomped into the living room and dug my passport and airline folder from my bag and brought them back to him. I shoved the lot into his hand. “Unless you think I have a secret identity and had someone else fly under my name while I snuck back into the country and murdered the poor bastard. But I’m sure the security cameras at Sea-Tac have tape from the Customs area that you could check if you don’t choose to believe me.”

  He studied the papers, his aura drawing
in but getting no less orange and frustrated. He huffed and handed the pages back to me.

  “Thank you for not arresting me.” Maybe I was a little snippy as I said it, but damn. . . . “So what happened to Simondson? And don’t stonewall—you owe me.”

  “Looked like a hit-and-run,” he admitted. “Maybe a beating.”

  “ ‘Looked like’? Was it or wasn’t it?”

  “No one knows. No witnesses. The body was already in rigor when found.”

  That struck me odd: Solis wasn’t the sort to reduce a victim to a mere corpse and dismiss it. “Where did this happen?” I peered at him, looking for a change in his energy that might give me a clue what he thought. Or what he was fishing for.

  “He was discovered at the old brewery buildings in Georgetown—the demolished end.”

  I noticed Solis didn’t claim the death itself had happened on the same site, but all I said was, “Hardly seems like his sort of neighborhood.” The man had been white collar all the way; even the fraud I caught him at that led to his murderous rage was genteel stuff.

  Georgetown—a former independent city of farmers and brewers that had been eaten up by the combined appetites of Boeing and the City of Seattle—was mostly industrial with a few isolated houses and clusters of shops among the warehouses, light manufacturing, and so on. It lay sandwiched between I-5 as it cut below the cliff of Beacon Hill on the east, and the mucky, muddy waters of the Duwamish river a few blocks away on the west. Cases I’d had down there had been connected to industrial accidents, theft, and that sort of thing. The area had made a stab at bohemian trendiness a while back when most of the old brewery and cold storage buildings had been converted into offices and studio space for artists, but that attempt had centered on the streets near the old brewery and hadn’t penetrated much farther. The brewery area housed a lot of funk in a few square blocks, not to mention a metal club named Nine-pound Hammer. It wasn’t the kind of business neighborhood in which I’d expect to find a former estate embezzler with anger management problems hanging out.

  The bare dozen blocks of houses still standing in Georgetown were mostly farther south, right across the road from the airfield—single-family structures from the first third of the twentieth century being renovated by hopeful yuppies who were not likely to take in guests from the parole board. Up by the old brewery where Simondson’s body had been found, only two blocks of old wooden houses stood in domestic isolation west of the freeway off-ramp, and I doubted most of them would have suited his taste.